Nov 13, 2009 20:58
1930;
Livin' my life in a slow hell
"This is his fault, too?" There was belligerence as she took it in. Attentive the way children were about larks forsaken by other children. That he was so different, so stark, and oddly unsettling was an attracting quality. This only another scarlet mote in a list, where he was not like the pock marked playmates of old.
Edward noncommittally shrugged, without looking at his skin, not liking the turn she'd decided to wander. He looked up at the far ceiling, reciting quiet and still, "Forgetful of their sins; Old, learned, respectable bald heads."
She'd only started to lunge forward toward his bare shoulder when Edward's arm flashed out, hand catching her around the throat, collapsing it under his fingers.
His voice a dark and warning growl. "Don't."
He watched her eyes, brilliant scarlet from the nights feast, bulge. The sound of choking lasting only a few seconds before she gave up the ghost of needing it and subsided for staring at him with a stony anger that neither wounded or concerned him.
Her sharp gnashing teeth only at that of child's wound over a newly spied toy placed out of reach. He wouldn't need to read her mind to hear the confused, plaintive, disgust, "I don't understand you."
"I didn't ask you to."
Nor would he tell her how many times a week he considered changing it.
The last two people he thought understood anything had brought him to this.
Her anger and lust warred, spurring and dousing each other. She, and all the ones she came with, would leave tomorrow or the next day or the next. It didn't matter to him. He'd be as relieved for the silence, as he was of the screaming now. They were not points of light or reason.
They were only slightly more condensed shadows in an encompassing void.
Edward drug her face back to his by his grasp of her neck, claiming her lips with a viciousness that threatened to break her skin. Catapulting her mercurial mental shift in a direction he set, but only barely distracting him from an unflagging rage of nothingness.
His fingers released her wind pipe, taking in the gasp as well as her willingness, against the sensation of his hand digging up into her long blonde hair. A lot of things were simpler in a wasteland. Especially survival by any means necessary.